New Events and Old Questions

Toall appearances the brief “lull” which has marked our
      revolutionary movement for the past six to nine months, as distinguished
      from its previous rapid and stormy development, is drawing to a
      close. However brief this “lull” may have been, however
      obvious it has been to every careful and informed observer that the
      absence (for so short a time) of open manifestations of mass indignation
      among the workers by no means signifies a stop in the growth of this
      indignation both in depth and in extent, numerous voices have nevertheless
      been raised among our intelligentsia—who are revolutionary in spirit
      but frequently have neither firm ties with the working class nor a sound
      foundation of definite socialist convictions—expressing despondency
      and a lack of faith in the mass working-class movement, on the one hand,
      and, on the other, calling for a repetition of the old tactics of
      individual, political assassinations as a necessary and obligatory method
      of political struggle at the present time. During the few months that have
      elapsed since the demonstrations of the previous season, a
      “party” of “Socialist-Revolutionaries” has had
      time to arise in our country, and has begun to declaim loudly that
      demonstrations have a discouraging effect, that “the people, alas,
      are still a long way off,” and that it is easy,of course, to
      speak and write of arming the masses, but that now it is necessary to get
      down to “individual resistance” without trying to wriggle out
      of the urgent necessity of individual terror by obsolete references to one
      and the same old task (so dull and “uninteresting” to the
      intellectual who is free from “dogmatic” faith in the
      working-class movement!) of carrying on agitation among the proletarian
      masses and organising a mass onslaught.

Butwhat at first sight seemed a most ordinary and “common
      place” strike suddenly broke out in Rostov-on-Don and led to events
      which manifestly demonstrated the utter stupidity and harmfulness of the
      Socialist-Revolutionaries’ attempt to restore the Narodnaya Volya movement
      with all its theoretical and tactical mistakes. The strike, which Involved
      many thousands of workers and began with demands of a purely economic
      nature, rapidly developed into a political event, despite the extreme
      dearth of organised revolutionary forces participating in it. Crowds of
      people which, according to some participants, numbered between twenty and
      thirty thousand, held astonishingly serious and well-organised political
      meetings where Social-Democratic leaf lets were read and eagerly
      discussed, political speeches were delivered, the most casual and
      untrained representatives of the working people were told the elementary
      truths of socialism and the political struggle, and practical and
      “object” lessons were given on how to deal with the soldiers
      and how to appeal to them. The authorities and the police lost their heads
      (perhaps partly because the soldiers could not be relied on?) and for
      several days proved unable to interfere with the organising of open-air
      political mass gatherings, the like of which had never before been seen in
      Russia. When armed force was finally brought in, the crowd offered
      desperate resistance, and the murder of a comrade served as the occasion
      for a political demonstration at his funeral the following day.... The
      Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, most likely see the thing in a
      different light; from their standpoint it would perhaps have been
      “more expedient” if the six comrades murdered in Rostov had
      given their lives in an attempt on the lives of individual police tyrants.

We,however, are of the opinion that it is only such mass movements, in
      which mounting political consciousness and revolutionary activity are
      openly manifested to all by the working class, that deserve to be calledgenuinely revolutionaryacts and are capable of really
      encouraging everyone who is fighting for the Russian revolution. What we
      see here is not the much-vaunted “individual resistance,” whose only
      connection with the masses consists of verbal declarations, publication of
      sentences passed, etc. Whatwe see is genuine resistance on the part of the crowd; and the lack of
      organisation, unpreparedness and spontaneity of this resistance remind us
      how unwise it is to exaggerate our revolutionary forces and how criminal
      it is to neglect the task of steadily improving the organisation and
      preparedness of this crowd, which is waging an actual struggle before our
      very eyes. The only task worthy of a revolutionary is to learn to
      elaborate, utilise and make our own the material which Russian life
      furnishes in only too great sufficiency, rather than fire a few shots in
      order to create pretexts for stimulating the masses, and material for
      agitation and for political reflection. The Socialist-Revolutionaries
      cannot find enough praise of the great “agitational” effect of
      political assassinations, about which there is so much whispering both in
      the drawing-rooms of the liberals and in the taverns of the common
      people. It is nothing to them (since they are free of all narrow dogmas on
      anything even approximating a definite socialist theory!) to stage a
      politicalsensationas a substitute (or, at least, as a
      supplement) for the political education of the proletariat. We, however,
      consider that theonlyevents that can have a real and serious
      “agitational” (stimulating), and not only stimulating but also
      (and this is far more important) educational, effect are events in which
      the masses themselves are the actors, events which are born of the
      sentiments of the masses and not staged “for a special
      purpose” by one organisation or another. We believe that even a
      hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an
      effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in
      meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and
      these interests are discussed, and as this participation in a struggle,
      which reallyrousesever new and “untapped” sections
      of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader
      revolutionary struggle. We are told of the disorganisation of the
      government (which has been obliged to replace Messrs. the Sipyagins by
      Messrs. the Plehves and to “select” the vilest scoundrels to
      serve it), but we are convinced that tosacrificeone
      revolutionary, even in exchange for ten scoundrels, means only
      disorganising our own ranks, which are thin as it is, so thin that they
      cannot keep up with all that is “demanded” of themby the workers. We believe that the government is truly disorganised when,
      and only when, the broad masses, genuinely organised by the struggle
      itself, plunge the government into a state of confusion; when the
      legitimacy of the demands of the progressive elements of the working class
      becomes apparent to the crowd in the street and begins to be clear even to
      part of the troops called out for the purpose of
      “pacification”; when military action against tens of thousands
      of the people is preceded by wavering among the authorities, who have no
      way of really knowing what this military action will lead to; when the
      crowd see and feel that those who have fallen on the field of civil war
      are their comrades, a part of themselves, and are filled with new wrath
      and a desire to grapple more decisively with the enemy. Here it is no
      longer some scoundrel, but the existing system as a whole that comes out
      as the enemy of the people, against whom are arrayed the local and the
      St. Petersburg authorities, the police, the Cossacks, and the troops, to
      say nothing of the gendarmes and the courts which, as ever, supplement and
      complete the picture in every popular uprising.

Yes,uprising. However far the beginning of what seemed to be a strike
      movement in a remote provincial town was from a “genuine”
      uprising, its continuation and its finale nevertheless evoke involuntary
      thoughts of an uprising. The prosaic motive for the strike and the minor
      nature of the demands presented by the workers throw into particularly
      bold relief, not only the mighty power of the solidarity of the
      proletariat, which at once saw that the railway workers’ struggle was the
      common cause of the proletarians, but also its receptiveness of political
      ideas and political propaganda, and its readiness to defend with might and
      main, in open battle with the troops, those rights to a free life and free
      development which all thinking workers have already come to consider
      common and elementary. And the Don Committee was a thousand times right
      when it declared in its proclamation, “To All Citizens,” which we
      print in full elsewhere in this issue, that the Rostov strike was one of
      the steps towards a general upsurge among the Russian workers with the
      demand for political

      liberty.[1]In events of this sort we really see with our own eyes how an armed
      uprising of the whole people against the autocratic government ismaturing, not only as an idea in the minds and programmes of the
      revolutionaries, but also as the inevitable, natural and practicalnextstep of the movement itself, as the result of the growing
      indignation, growing experience, and growing boldness of the masses, who
      are being given such valuable lessons, such a splendid education by the
      realities of Russian life.

Aninevitable and natural step, I have said—and I hasten to make the
      reservation:if onlywe do not permit ourselves to depart by a
      single step from the impending and pressing task of assisting these
      masses, who have already begun to rise, to act more boldly and
      concertedly; of giving them not a couple but dozens of open-air speakers
      and leaders; of creating a real, militant organisation capable of guiding
      the masses, and not a so-called “combat organisation” that
      guides elusive individuals (if it does guide them at all). That this is a
      difficult task goes without saying, but we can quite justifiably adapt
      Marx’s words which have so frequently and so ineptly been quoted of late,
      and say: “Every step ofrealmovement is more important
      than a dozen” individual attempts and cases of resistance, more
      important than a hundred organisations and “parties” belonging
      only to the

      intelligentsia.[2]

Besidesthe Rostov fighting, the penal sentences passed on demonstrators
      are outstanding among recent political events. The government has decided
      to use every possible method of intimidation, from floggings to penal
      servitude. And what a splendid reply it received from the workers, whose
      speeches in court we give

      below[3];

      how instructive this reply is to all those who were especially loud in
      their outcries about the discouraging effect of demonstrations, not
      because they wanted to encourage further work in this direction, but
      because they wanted to preach much-vaunted individual resistance!  These
      speeches, coming as they do from the very thick of the proletariat, are
      excellent commentaries on events like those in Rostov, and, at the same
      time, they are remarkable statements (“public manifestations,” I
      would say if this were not so specifically police terminology), imbuing
      with boundless vigour the long and difficult work for the
      “real” steps of the movement. What is remarkable in these
      speeches is the simple, authenticallyprecise description of how the most everyday facts, occurring inscores and

	hundreds 01 millions,of the “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
      exploitation” of the workers in present-day society lead to the
      awakening of their consciousness, to their growing “revolt,” to a
      revolutionary expression of this revolt (I have put in quotation marks the
      words Ihadto use in describing the speeches of the
      Nizhni-Novgorod workers, for they are the famous words which Marx uses in
      the last pages of the first volume ofCapital, and which evoked
      such clamorous and unsuccessful attempts on the part of the
      “critics,” opportunists, revisionists, etc., to refute the
      Social-Democrats and accuse them of not telling the truth).

Forthe very reason that these speeches came from ordinary workers by no
      means advanced in their development, workers who did not even speak as
      members of any particular organisation, but simply as men in the crowd,
      for the very reason that they stressed not their personal convictions but
      facts from the life of every proletarian or semi-proletarian in Russia,
      for that very reason their conclusions are so inspiring: “that is
      why we consciously went to the demonstration against the autocratic
      government.” The ordinariness and “mass character” of the
      facts from which they drew their conclusions are a guarantee that
      thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, can and inevitably will come to
      the same conclusion, provided we prove capable of continuing, extending,
      and strengthening systematic, theoretically consistent, and all-round
      revolutionary (Social Democratic) influence over them. We are ready to be
      condemned to penal servitude for fighting against political and economic
      slavery now that we have felt the breath of liberty, said four workers
      from Nizhni-Novgorod. And thousands of workers in Rostov, who for several
      days won for themselves the right to hold political gatherings, fighting
      off a series of attacks on the part of the soldiers against the unarmed
      crowd, repeated after them as It were: we are ready to face death.

Bythis sign shall ye conquer, is all that remains for us to say to those who
      have eyes to see and ears to hear.

[1]The proclamation of the Don Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., “To All
      Citizens,” dated November 6, 1902, was reprinted byIskra,
      No. 29, December 1, 1902.

[2]Lenin is referring to the following passage from Karl Marx’s letter to
      Wilhelm Bracke, of May 5, 1875: “Every step of real movement is more
      important than a dozen programmes” (see Marx and Engels,Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 16).

[3]Lenin is referring to the speeches made in court on October 28-31
      (November 10-13), 1902, by Nizhni-Novgorod workers on trial for taking
      part in demonstrations on May I and 5 (14 and 18), 1902. The speeches were
      originally published as a separate leaflet by the Nizhni-Novgorod
      Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.; they were later reprinted byIskra(No. 29, December 1, 1902) under the heading “Nizhni-Novgorod
      Workers in Court” and issued as a separate pamphlet.